Ewok

Background

Soleil Wheeler, also known as Ewok on social media, was born in the U.S. on September 18, 2005. Wheeler comes from a family that is hard of hearing and he was born deaf; his father was a well-known sign language professor who appeared on the television show “ASL That!”. Despite this, he has gone on to establish himself as a gamer and now has over 343,900 Twitch followers, 349,200 Twitter followers, 540,000 Instagram followers, and 148,000 YouTube subscribers as of September 2021.

Wheeler started playing “Fortnite” in 2018 and quickly began to stand out as a skilled player. After being hosted by popular streamer TimTheTatman, Wheeler became well known. Streamers such as Twitch staff, Epic Games employees, and others soon started watching Wheeler’s early streams. Because Wheeler is deaf, he uses sound visualization in the game in order to be able to play. He communicates with his teammates via a chatbox on a second monitor. He told CNN that sometimes if he has to physically move his hands over, someone will shoot them, so most of the time, he has to move his hand back to the game very quickly.

Twitch announced Wheeler as an official partner in 2019. Many celebrities and gamers congratulated him, including the well-known gamer Ninja, who said “hello” to him the next day during a stream. Wheeler joined the prestigious gaming organization FaZe Clan the same year. The player was one of the organization’s youngest members and Faze Clan’s only deaf member. In 2019, Wheeler announced his departure from Twitch to join Mixer, Microsoft’s new streaming service. He left Mixer in June 2020, following the service’s demise. On National Coming Out Day, Wheeler came out as trans in October 2020 and announced his new pronouns: he/him. The streamer also admitted to being bisexual.